Alina Selyukh

Alina Selyukh 2016

Stephen Voss
/ NPR

Alina Selyukh is a business reporter at NPR, where she follows the path of the retail and tech industries, tracking how America's biggest companies are influencing the way we spend our time, money, and energy.

Before joining NPR in October 2015, Selyukh spent five years at Reuters, where she covered tech, telecom and cybersecurity policy, campaign finance during the 2012 election cycle, health care policy and the Food and Drug Administration, and a bit of financial markets and IPOs.

Selyukh began her career in journalism at age 13, freelancing for a local television station and several newspapers in her home town of Samara in Russia. She has since reported for CNN in Moscow, ABC News in Nebraska, and NationalJournal.com in Washington, D.C. At her alma mater, Selyukh also helped in the production of a documentary for NET Television, Nebraska's PBS station.

She received a bachelor's degree in broadcasting, news-editorial and political science from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

One of the first things you notice approaching the old Olympic Park of Sochi in Russia is the unmistakable shape of a Disney-style castle, flanked by the unmistakable shapes of roller coasters, surrounded by clusters of palm trees.

On a cold December night last year, a meeting was called in the lobby of my apartment building. Concerned residents gathered to discuss a matter of great import: what to do about the swarms of packages jamming the lobby closet and overflowing into the entryway.

Unclaimed boxes were an eyesore and a nuisance. Finding the right package was starting to require gymnastic ability. And theboxes kept coming, by the dozens, maybe hundreds. Most of them were from Amazon: brown, with a smile on the side.

The man who built Starbucks into a worldwide empire is finally parting ways with his company. Howard Schultz is retiring, stepping down as the executive chairman of Starbucks. This means a new wave of speculation has started that he may be looking to get into politics.

Democrats are staging an insurgency of sorts today in the Senate. They're forcing a vote on net neutrality. It's a last-ditch effort to keep Obama-era regulations on internet service providers in place. Here's Senator Ed Markey last week pushing for the vote.

For years, this has been one of Amazon's biggest secrets: how many people pay for the Prime membership.

A big round number appears to have prompted CEO Jeff Bezos to finally lift the veil: "13 years post-launch, we have exceeded 100 million paid Prime members globally," he wrote in this year's letter to shareholders.

A federal grand jury in Arizona has indicted seven people behind the classified-ads website Backpage.com on 93 counts, including charges of facilitating prostitution and money laundering.

The defendants include founders Michael Lacey, 69, and James Larkin, 68, as well as other shareholders and employees. The indictment accuses the executives of presenting Backpage as a site to advertise escort services while knowing that "the overwhelming majority of the website's ads involve prostitution." The indictment says the site made over $500 million in "prostitution-related revenue."

President Trump has argued in recent days that the U.S. Postal Service has lost a fortune delivering Amazon packages at a discount.

However, some of the agency's problems might lie with the president. The top planning and oversight board at the Postal Service has been unable to meet and consider matters such as the agency's long-term relationship with Amazon, because the president has failed to appoint any of the nine governors to the 11-member Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service.

It's 1995, and Chris Cox is on a plane reading a newspaper. One article about a recent court decision catches his eye. This moment, in a way, ends up changing his life — and, to this day, it continues to change ours.

The case that caught the congressman's attention involved some posts on a bulletin board — the early-Internet precursor to today's social media. The ruling led to a new law, co-authored by Cox and often called simply "Section 230."

There's a big movement among major retail companies to become more than just places that sell you things. In the latest example, Walmart is partnering with a home-services app called Handy to give shoppers a deal on professional help assembling furniture or installing a TV.

After decades of being the go-to toy store for many Americans, Toys R Us is officially going out of business. Unable to get its finances in order through a months-long bankruptcy process, the retail chain has reached the end of the line.

The Federal Communications Commission is working toward officially taking current net neutrality rules off the books. The agency took the requisite formal step of publishing the rules on Thursday, opening the door for lawsuits from a number of state attorneys general and advocacy groups.

In the last three months of 2017, Amazon saw its profit more than double to reach a record of $1.9 billion. The company's sales continued to soar during the holiday quarter as more people signed up for its fast-delivery Prime program and bought its voice-activated device Echo.

If you've never seen it, a Tide Pod looks like a little rounded packet, white with two separate swirls of blue and orange liquid.

To be clear, a Tide Pod is laundry detergent heavily concentrated into a single packet, meant to dissolve in water and clean a single load of laundry. But these days, it's a dare — an Internet meme, in which teenagers try to eat Tide Pods as a "challenge."